Rome II Daughters Of Mars DLC Adds Warrior Women

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While some battle tactics are outstripped by technology, it’s actually gotten quite a lot easier to perform the above strategy thanks to the removal of platemail in modern times. Still equally as effective at causing extreme pain and temporary, floor-based groan-paralysis too. It’s part of the latest Total War: Rome II DLC ‘Daughters of Mars’, which adds a number of women-only formations to The Creative Assembly’s grand strategy. They’ve also released a free update providing some female units to a couple of factions and updating the roster of the Suebi.

Here’s what’s being made available for free and which factions they’re allied with:

Amazonian Riders (Royal Scythia, mercenaries)

Hex-Bearers (Suebi)

Horse Runners (Suebi)

Riders of the Hunt (Suebi)

Round Shield Swordsmen (Suebi)

Scythian Noblewomen (Royal Scythia)

Spear Wall (Suebi)

According to the official forums, the Suebi update was requested by the community to attempt to make the faction more powerful and popular. The new units are an even spread of skirmishers, spearmen and cavalry so it’s improvements across the board.

The Daughters of Mars DLC is on Steam now for £1.99. It adds seven units, all women, to a variety of factions. Most of them are available as mercenaries too. Here’s their trailer-based introduction:

Badass. To show off the new units and improved Suebi faction, Creative Assembly are taking to their Twitch channel for three hours at 3pm (that’s in an hour).

Based on what I read while browsing the forums, it sounds like Rome II has managed to get itself back on track after a shaky start. Who out there is still playing it? Have CA managed to patch the more annoying bugs? What are you hoping to see from them next?

44 Comments

Does the game still have laughably atrocious battle and siege AI? Indications from forums and such are ‘yes’, but people aren’t necessarily objective, I guess. They’re trying to gouge money out of people for all this DLC, and yet I’m still not sure if they even have the basics working.

There was a patch about 3 or 4 weeks ago which overhauled siege AI, it was supposed to be pretty good. The AI is much more aggressive and uses its siege engines more effectively. They actually attempt to climb your walls now.

Field Battle AI has been steadily improving and is actually good now. Siege AI has been overhauled recently and is quite decent. The one outstanding problem in the game is the weak politics system. Right now, the game is almost in the state it should have been when it was released one year ago. Had they thoroughly tested it and waited this extra year, it would probably be praised as one of the best entries in the series. Alas, the damage is done. Let’s hope it works as a lesson for CA/Sega (and for preordering customers).

I think its one of the better entries in the series now. I think the blame for this game being in this state is actually SEGA’s. It seems to fit the modus operandi of a giant publisher exactly to rush a game out before its done. As of now Rome 2 is potentially one of the best in the series. If they keep patching and adding to it the game will simply be astounding.

Total War games are nearly always something you only buy once it hits the budget bin – then they are patched and really good. Buying at launch is only a waste of money and a exercise in frustration, sad to say.

No, it’s not all SEGA’s fault. Yes, it was pushed out way too early and that’s probably SEGA’s fault. But there are game design decisions at the rotten heart of Rome 2 that are entirely CA’s fault.

It ranges from minor things that they’ve (mostly) stepped back from, like idiotic capture flags in open field battles and gate-torching, to seriously bad design in the Political system, where every single faction in the game is forced through a half-assed version of Roman political history. And the sea battles are still ridiculous.

It’s playable now and even fun as an Ancient World land battle simulator, when I need my fix of armies wailing on each other with sharp sticks. But that’s all I use the Campaign for, as a battle generator. It’s hard to take it seriously otherwise.

Ha ha as sad as it is CA have treated Rome as an early access title and a superb one at that. When I bought it initially despite the poor reviews and purely out of love for the theme, I was less than impressed with the grand campaign. Now however after they have been steadily plugging away at the problems it has turned into a fantastic fun and immersive game.

I have played every Total War since the first Medieval, and I think its the best in the series (although I am biased to classical history). There is simply so much pleasure to be had watching tiny legionaries decapitate and destroy the puny Gauls and Carthaginians.

I thought original Rome, on Steam anyway, got borked when they patched it to remove Gamespy. If this isn’t the case then somebody let me know because I was on the verge of re-installing it last weekend but checked the Steam forum and now apparently enemy sieges are really buggy (I mean the AI was always buggy in sieges but REALLY buggy now). I may have read it affected MTW2 as well but I wasn’t really paying attention to that.

For me the game has more positive than negative features. Playing through the Hannibal campaign at the moment and really enjoying the fact that my characters have more persistence (don’t die of old age after a few turns.)

Still some issues of course. (I wish, when it prompts you to promote a general/character after pressing the ‘end turn’ button, that it would just take you straight to the unit in question the way Civ V does, rather than forcing you to click your way there.)

Is it just me who thinks Will (the bearded redhead bloke) is related to Simon Pegg? Like a cousin, nephew or something? Maybe he went to Pegg’s old school (where everybody acts and talks that way??) or maybe he just met him down the pub on a Dungeons & Dragons night once and something klicked in his brain? There must be some sort of connection why he acts exactly like Simon Pegg’s character in Spaced so much… anyone know what it is?

Last time I played was a few months ago, it was still very rough with my computer, the politics system still unfinished, and the AI atrocious. I gave Empire a pass because they’d never attempted a Total War game on such a massive scale before, but I am not so forgiving anymore. Hopefully things have either improved by now or will improve to a point where the game reaches a scintilla of what it could’ve been.

It was never a truly awful game from a gameplay perspective, that was just Nerd Rage from the obese basement-dweller contingent. MY ROMES!!!

End of turn times have come right down, so it no longer takes months and months to finish a game and you don’t need to bring reading material with you before starting play. This was the biggest problem on release and they appear to have pretty much cracked it. It’s now basically where a working copy of Empire ended up.

The recent AI patch has made battles a bit better. Complaining about AI has been a feature of pretty much every TW release ever, so it’s usually hard to take seriously. However, the AI decision making was actually lame enough that it exacerbated the “yet another battle against barbarian spearmen” factor. This is possibly a basic conceptual problem with a game about imperial Rome, however, since “yet another battle against barbarian spearmen” is probably what actual legionaries thought if they were sent anywhere north of the Alps.

As takfar says above, the remaining big issue is the political system just not working the way they and we had hoped. When playing as Rome, this does mean the game meanders quite a bit in the middle. I’d rather have that than the Shogun 2 AI dogpile, however.

“It was never a truly awful game from a gameplay perspective, that was just Nerd Rage from the obese basement-dweller contingent. MY ROMES!!!”

I disagree entirely. The reasons why people hated it were not purely technical in nature, it’s largely for mechanical reasons. Maybe you feel differently, but for me the campaign is utterly sterile and boring. There is nothing to do but incrementally make irrelevant numbers go up, mostly gamey “buffs” to boot. The game lacks flavour, has an interface that manages to be both ugly and functionally worse than its predecessors, has drab and uninspired music, practically no artwork worthy of note, and remains a boring chore to play. Debate over whether it works as intended out the box or not, but my issue with the game has nothing to do with the technical workings or bugs: It’s a badly designed, boring game with little to no historical flavour to elevate the tedium.

And for the record, I am neither a basement dweller nor obese, not that either of these traits have any bearing on the general perception of a title.

Anyway, I uninstalled the game a month or two ago, because the campaign kept crashing at the 287th turn, and 12 patches later is still crashed there. Specifically, during a particular AIs turn. Also, turn time refused to go down on this campaign which I had started after the first patch was out.

Oh good, another bloody patch. So far every patch has messed up all saves made before that patch, so attempting to load any save from a previous version of the game causes a crash to desktop. This is quite a problem when a single campaign can be tens of hours long. Grrrrrrrr.

(And yes, I have disabled updates, but that’s put it into an “update on launch” state – anyone know how to set a game on Steam to not update at all and launch even if it’s out of date?)

I feel obligated to point out two things- first, groin kicking an opponent with a shield and spear is, at best, a bad idea; and secondly, if you’re in ancient Rome and find someone wearing plate mail, you’re battling a time traveler.

It’s a lot better, especially with the right mods – which of course vary by flavour. Some mods turn your game into 360-no-scope-call-of-duty-dorritios-edition with the ridiculous amount of innacurate units and formations they add *cough*radious*cough*

While others add layers of strategic depth, or make small but impactful changes such as 4 turns per year & seasons.

I think for it to really hit it’s glory days it needs a lot more work, not anything these small DLCs could bring about. A fall-of-the-samurai sized expo with a wealth of fixes would be appreciated, although after being burned on buying this at release I wouldn’t fork over any cash unless it was REALLY well done and fixed a lot of the glaring issues with the game.

Yes, I second the fall-of-the-samurai sized expansion. What I think is fundamentally needed is that CA admit that a lot of their ideas in Rome 2, and by this I do actually mean ideas and not just implementation, were fundamentally flawed, and that a rethink is needed. Empire, for example, was broken and terrible at release, but for my money is actually now not a bad game. Rome 2 is more boring now than Empire ever was, and what is urgently needed is an emphasis on flavour, historicity, and attention to detail.

I think that interview with James Russell was incredibly instructive in deconstructing why CA’s games just don’t feel like they used to. CA top brass apparently ordered the cutting of features, even if they were 90% done, that would not affect the game’s metascore. This kind of thinking is totally reprehensible to me, especially since so much of what made Rome 1 such a good game could be summed up as “the little things”.

There isn’t enough powerful women represented in this game about ancient Roman warfare and culture. I’m glad they have inserted some fantasy female fighting soldiers into the game that are extremely thin looking with pretty faces. I’m also glad that the designers didn’t bother wasting money by researching any political or social roles where great women have held great power in more subtle ways and could be inserted into other areas of the game.

Consumers can only understand a woman is powerful if she is kitted out to fight. The same stands true in any historical setting for a movie. I can only understand a woman is powerful if she is slaughtering loads of people despite being physically very slight. It’s like how tiny thin men are always the ones slaughtering people in action movies. I’m glad we never see women warriors who are chunky with below average looks, that kind of shit is not fun to look at.

I made the mistake of reading those books back in the summer of two thousand and dickety zero and now I can’t enjoy what is no doubt an awesome tv series due to constantly getting grumpy with the changes.
In addition, that woman playing Brienne is ‘Hollywood unattractive’, she is attractive but has a bad haircut, typically she should also be wearing glasses. In the books she is buck toothed with a flat nose and a big bottom.

Well, there were women fighting at the time, only not among roman and greek regular armies, there were women gladiators and some barbarian cultures had women fighters, which was of course blown out of proportions by the extremely mysoginist greeks with the myth of the amazons.

I think the problem is that for many writers is very difficult to overcome the limits the average woman in such societies encountered, and they go for “xenafication” instead (damn you TVtropes) even when it’s not plausible.